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Date: 05-31-02 16:48

Don't have much in the way of experience to share but I will state that if anyone has worked on the psychology of learning they might be a little nervous about experimenting with narcotics in general.

There is no doubt in my mind that taking certain drugs can relax you, can help you concentrate and can enhance your creative experience but it could also impede your process of learning, which I assume is something that most of us don't want.

State learning is a phenomena where an activity that is learned under a certain state, can only be repeated in that state.

A good friend of mine graduated with a degree in molecular chemistry from University of Notre Dame. Now to put it simply the guy was a little "Stoney," you know "wake and bake," he probably didn't have two days go by where he didn't engage in at least some minor consumption of pot. Well that is fine in college, smoke all you want. He did really well in school too, graduated with a high, no pun intended, GPA. In fact he did so well that Lilly, a major drug manufacturer, with a plant in Indianapolis picked him up right out of undergrad, not bad I thought, since most of us went off to less than lucrative positions answering other peoples phones. But, there was a downside, as he quickly discovered, after smoking for the better part of four years, taking all his classes and homework in an "enhanced state," he had to get straight and sober real fast. Obviously a lot of companies do drug test, and Lilly did, but by that time he was clean. On his first day of work at Lilly, he sat down to do some simple lab work and couln't remember how to put together a growth solution in a Petri dish. After a while he realized that there were a lot of things that he couldn't remember quite how to do, sterilize a test tube, write down lab results, little stuff. The problem was that he learned everything in that state, basically high, and about the only way that he could remember how to do it again was when he had a J in his hand. Anyway that is a phenomena called state learning, you learn something in that state, you need to be in that state of mind to recreate that action.

Certainly there are countries where certain drugs are legal. Certainly a lot of people, and many artists and athletes, that I have known do experiment with drugs to improve their creativity and performance, but I honestly believe that in the long term the gains that you make whilst straight and sober will be there in the long run, a temporary fix is really only temporary.

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Axl Rose

05-29-02 05:51

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